Opening Bell: 1.5.18
Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Plans Sale of 29% of Stake (BBG)
Former Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, who has long boasted that he’s never sold any shares in the company he co-founded, plans to sell about 29 percent of his stake in the ride-hailing company, people with knowledge of the matter said. Kalanick stands to reap about $1.4 billion from the transaction with SoftBank Group Corp. and a consortium of investors who have agreed to buy equity valuing Uber at $48 billion.
Morgan Stanley to take $1.25 billion hit in the fourth quarter from the tax bill (Reuters)
Morgan Stanley said on Friday it would take a $1.25 billion hit in its fourth-quarter earnings due to a cut in corporate tax rate as part of the U.S. tax code overhaul. The net blow of the bill to the bank will include about a $1.4 billion net discrete tax provision, mainly due to the remeasurement of certain net deferred tax assets using the lowered corporate tax rate, the company said in a filing. It would be offset by $160 million in other positive effects, Morgan Stanley added.
Equities Correction Is Nearing, Survey Finds (II)
Investors’ skepticism is increasing along with the relentless bull market in stocks. Global equities will fall by at least 10 percent in the coming 18 months, according to 71 percent of institutional investors who were polled in by Managing Partners Group. The survey, released Thursday, was conducted among 54 institutional investors globally in December. SEE ALSO: Ralph Acampora: I am so bullish I have to sit down and calm down
Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg (NYT)
Ripple has said it has signed up more than 100 banks to use the company’s technology, including American Express and Banco Santander. But banks do not need to use Ripple tokens for Ripple’s software to transfer dollars, euros and yen. That point appears to be lost on many small time investors who are buying Ripple tokens...Several virtual currency hedge fund investors said that they have talked to banks and heard about interest in Ripple’s software, but not its tokens. RELATED: Ripple Slides After Coinbase Says Not Adding New Crypto Coins
Fewer Listed Companies: Is That Good or Bad for Stock Markets? (WSJ)
The reliance on private capital has made it harder for stock investors to get exposure to younger companies that would have otherwise listed on an exchange more quickly. The average age of a listed company last year was about 18 years old, while in 1996, companies that were public were about 12 years old, according to data compiled by Pantheon Partners.
Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 Resolutions (Facebook)
With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it. There are important counter-trends to this --like encryption and cryptocurrency -- that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.
You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else (Nautilus)
This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbor around 137,438,953,472 individuals—more people than were alive then or now. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more weblike. You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over.
Has The Time Come For A Quantum Revolution In Economics? (Aeon)
It is something of a cliché to say that the discrete, dualistic, entangled and uncertain behavior of quantum matter challenges every aspect of our worldview. But it does not seem quite so bizarre or alienating when viewed from an economic perspective – in fact, we deal with it every time we go shopping or cash a cheque. The point is not that quantum mechanics can be viewed as a metaphor for understanding money, but that the economy is a quantum system in its own right, with its own very real versions of measurement, indeterminacy and entanglement. An advantage is that these concepts lack the obscure and confusing nature of their counterparts in physics. You don’t need to be an Erwin Schrödinger to know that value is uncertain, or to understand that tapping your credit card initiates a virtual money transfer.
Here's The Sports Highlight Of The Day (Deadspin)
Oh, what’s that? Your dog can sled? That’s real cute. Now get the fuck out of here, because this one can also act as its own ski lift.